Dicamba Labeling To Change For 2018 Growing Season, EPA Says

The Environmental Protection Agency has set new restrictions on the weed killer dicamba.

Krisofor Husted
/ Harvest Public Media

Originally published on October 13, 2017 12:28 pm

Listen

Listening...

/

There will be new restrictions on the weed killer dicamba for the 2018 growing season, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says.

The broadly defined restrictions, similar to what the state of Missouri imposed over the summer, were announced Friday in a news release. The EPA says it reached an agreement with agriculture giants Monsanto, BASF and DuPont on ways to tamp down on dicamba drift, which has been blamed for destroying or damaging millions of acres of crops in the United States.

Monsanto, BASF and DuPont will change their labels to show dicamba is for “restricted use” and that it should only be applied to crops when winds are below 10 mph. The EPA also will require farmers to keep track of their use of the herbicide.

EPA Administration Scott Pruitt says in the news release that the restrictions are “the result of intensive, collaborative efforts” between state universities, state agriculture departments and the manufacturers.

As of September, there were 2,200 official dicamba-related investigations in the U.S., according to Kevin Bradley, a weed specialist at the University of Missouri. And the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting published a story this week that looked at possible ties between dicamba drift and damage to oak trees.

Bradley says the EPA’s regulations weren’t a surprise.

“If EPA hadn’t done what it said it was going to do today, many state departments of ag would have taken those measures anyway,” he says.

Bradley also says that the new steps aren’t likely to have a strong impact.

“I don’t think there was anybody out there who was planning on using it that are not going to use it now because they have to take an online training or because they have to spray it when the wind is less than 10 miles per hour,” he says.

Related Content

As soybean and cotton farmers across the Midwest and South continue to see their crops ravaged from the weed killer dicamba, new complaints have pointed to the herbicide as a factor in widespread damage to oak trees.

Monsanto and BASF, two of agriculture’s largest seed and pesticide providers, released versions of the dicamba this growing season. The new versions came several months after Monsanto released its latest cotton and soybean seeds genetically engineered to resist dicamba in 2016. Since then, farmers across the Midwest and South have blamed drift from dicamba for ruining millions of acres of soybeans and cotton produced by older versions of seeds.

Now, complaints have emerged that the misuse of dicamba may be responsible for damage to oak trees in Iowa, Illinois and Tennessee.